UK Bank Barclays is First to Support Bitcoin

Banks have been poking around bitcoin technology for some time to better understand how it works and how they might use it.
Over the weekend, Barclays announced (paywall) that it would help charities accept bitcoin payments, making it the first UK bank to support the currency.
Banks across the world have been exploring bitcoin, trying to determine the potential uses for the digital currency and its underlying blockchain technology.
While most of these discussions and projects have been private and internal, banks are slowly escalating their bitcoin experiments.
Some hurdles remain before banks widely adopt bitcoin and blockchain technology.